Interfere
by Garmonbozia
Summary: The Fall was not inevitable. Different characters confess their guilt, and the roles they took in making it happen. [Update: Now with added Jim.]
1. Sebastian Moran

Mine is not a name that anybody is ever supposed to know. The idea is that I walk in, I do the job, I walk out again, and nobody needs to know any more than that it's done. I like it that way. So my name is not generally a thing I go about broadcasting. But today, now, for the record, my name is Sebastian Moran. It wasn't always and it's liable to change again at some stage, but that's another charge altogether and it can't be tried to today. My name is Sebastian Moran. It's been about ten years since my last confession.

The papers or the dock or the confessional, it all amounts to the same thing. Here is a thing that happened and here is a weight I need to get off my soul.

You will be familiar, if you haven't been in a coma, with the events that took place last week at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Two men dead, two suicides, two lives destroyed. Well, no, more than two lives destroyed. That would be nice, actually, if it was just the dead people who suffer when they die, but it's not. That would be a very comforting thing. But it's not. It's loads of people. Everybody's got mates and employees and people who, one way or another depend on them. People you don't even know personally rely on you to be what you are.

Look at me. No name, no face half the time. But people rely on me to be what I am. To get the job done.

So here's my confession. I, Sebastian Moran, was in a position to prevent every single scrap of this suffering. And as I'm sure you can tell from the fact that you are, after all, familiar with these events, I didn't do it.

Now, if this was the confessional, just admitting that would be enough. That's the idea of it; if you repent in your heart you're already forgiven. But there's a reason I'm lapsed these days. So just in case the confessional isn't working for me anymore, here's the details, like the judge and the journalist would want.

There are those who know of my former association with James Moriarty, now deceased. Those people have questioned, more than once, how he could be so close to the end of his own game and me not notice. I'll be honest, I've asked myself the same question a hundred bloody times since it happened. But there's a part of me knows there's no point asking that question. I never really take it seriously. I think it, and it stings, but when you boil it all down, I can't beat myself up over that. People who ask me that question clearly didn't know him.

He kept me out of it. It's that simple. Not just me, but others, just as close and closer. He kept everybody out of it. We were all just playing along. Pulling little jobs here and there. We got a painting nicked, we got a fella kidnapped, put a couple of kids in front of a pile of sweets and let nature take its course. Nothing we hadn't done before. We'd done something very like it almost exactly a year previous. I was thinking to myself I was going to have to start keeping that particular time of year clear, like Christmas, like August holidays. The Annual Mess-Holmes-Around Session.

But what with being closer than most, and making a will being absolutely useless if nobody knows about it, I had about twelve hours advance noticed of the actual… _event_. Did I _want_ twelve hours notice? No. No, I frigging well didn't. But I got it, nonetheless. And I did what any sensible person would do in the face of talk like that, and I walked out and left him to it.

Don't hold that against me. I'm not proud of it, but don't hold it against me. Get your best mate to stand there and essentially tell you he's going to top himself before you hold that against me, alright?

So I walked out.

And then I walked home. And I got the rifle case out of the safe and then I walked almost all the way back. I parked up on the opposite building, and I assembled said-rifle, and I got a decent shot lined up right down the hall, where he'd be crossing for drinks or a last supper, or at the very latest for breakfast in the morning, and I settled myself to wait.

Prick's finished with this life, I was thinking, well fine. But I wasn't up for letting him hang it all out in public, make a spectacle and a media circus out of what should have been something private. And not just for him, the selfish bastard, but for us that would mourn him. And you can take that bleeding look off your face and all, because there's plenty to have mourned, or if there are only a few then it's quality over quantity. You call him the villain, knock yourself out. He called himself that. Me, I called him my mate and I'm not the only one did so. So just take the bleeding smirk off, please…

So I was sitting there maybe an hour before I realized I wasn't actually going to kill him.

That's not what I meant when I told you I was going to stop it all. What I meant was, even when I figured that out, my aim stayed true and I stayed behind my gun. It came to me very clearly. See, when it came to pulling all the strings, getting lots of disparate ducks to form an orderly queue, that was what made him special. Me, my talent lies elsewhere. My talent lies in the tiny weight of a single bullet. One shot. One shot can change everything and that's what I can do. Jim knew that. Really he was the only person who ever thought it was a proper skill to be proud of.

Lodged in his ribs too close to the heart to be easily removed. Jammed into his kneecap, surrounded by splinters of bone. In the wall behind him, but having grazed the side of his neck, the blood loss enough to knock him out but not kill him until the ambulance could get there.

One shot could have changed everything. Jim knew that.

He walked past the end of my sight. And I could have very easily got him in the knee. That would have been an end to it. Barring the crippling pain in the there-and-then, which honestly he just bloody deserved, he would have been off the leg. It would have been an end to all those stairs at Bart's, after all. Long way up to the roof. And he wouldn't have been able to move at any speed for me to stop him. Neighbours hear the shot, means cops, means ambulance, means necessary time spent in hospital and Bart's wasn't our closest.

In addition, he would have known I'd shot him in the kneecap, and he probably would have known I was thinking all that when I did it. And maybe, just a little bit of hope sort of maybe, that would have made him think again.

But one way or another it would have been over.

He walked past the end of my sight, made himself a sandwich, and walked back again. And then I disassembled my rifle, put it away, and went home. The next day he told me where to be and to keep an eye on Holmes, and I went and did it. And I watched him swallow a bullet. And that's how it happened, because I didn't stop it.

This can't be confession after all. I used to feel better after confession.

* * *

[A/N - Who do you want to hear from next?]


	2. James Moriarty

How could I have _stopped_ it? Well, not starting it would have been an idea. But then, if it was never started is it technically possible to have stopped it? And if I wasn't going to start it, was it even an idea in the first place and what would the _point_ of stopping it be? Stopped it, yeah, sure, any time I could have stopped it. A million times over, every minute of every day it was in the fecking works I could have stopped it but the point is, and bear with me here, I started it. Right? Following? I started it so why on this side of hell or any other would I ever have stopped it?

See, I'm not like you. I don't have to know you to say with confidence that I am not like you. I don't change my mind once I've started something, because I don't start it until I'm sure. You don't even notice, do you, the way you go cannonballing about your life, firing into one thing and lurching from one idiocy to the next, when if you'd just stand back and look at it first, none of that would happen. Wars could be averted. Famines. Great atrocities. I'm pretty well certain, in fact, that if humanity would behave with a bit of sense, natural disasters might just not happen. We could bring balance to the world, if you were all just a little more like me.

But you're not like me. That's why it seems like a smart and sensible question, to ask me if I could have put a stop to all this at some stage. Because you presume that stopping it was ever a possibility. Because you're human, and you think like that, and it makes you weak.

Stop it? I could have not started it. But then again, that wasn't really an option either. After the last big game? After that _awful_ draw, after having to walk away and I was so ready for him to just _do_ it, whether Moran was going to shoot him or not, to hell with it, I'd brought him there, Nureyev had never danced better for me, I'd _done_ it, yeah, fine, let him shoot and it all goes up and then to _have to walk away_… Oh God. Oh, no. No. There was no leaving it there.

Can you understand that? Sometimes I have trouble gauging it. I know there's a lot of things that happen one way in my head and another in everybody else's. Sometimes I can't tell which way it is. Can you understand there was no stopping at that stage?

That bloody pool. I thought it was in my clothes or my hair or something, but I could smell chlorine for weeks. Psychosomatic, probably. Everybody somebody _mentions_ it I can smell that sharp, cloying disinfectant bloody smell, it _haunted_ me. There was no stopping there. If I left it at the pool I'd be leaving myself there, forever. It all just stopped. Everything just stopped. No matter what I did, I felt like I was still standing there. So really, when you think about it, not starting wasn't an option either. It was already started. So how could I have stopped it?

Well, to go back another stage, I suppose I didn't necessarily have to blow up his neighbours. But then again…

Do you remember when you were a kid, and it depends on your era what they were, but you'd have some sort of trading card craze happened at some point or another? Of course you do. Everybody lived through one of these. So you'd be buying your packets one day and start unwrapping, and all of a sudden, boom (pardon the pun), there she is, gorgeous, beautiful, and liable to be printed on foil, _that_ card. The one nobody dared to dream of. Now, it's going to get nicked if you just go flashing it around everywhere, the world and his wife are going to grab at it and destroy it and tear it apart. You only tell your mates. The ones that are going to get it.

Bear with me. I don't do insane memory lane rambles unless there's a point.

The Greenwich job, or whatever he called it, that was really about putting five pre-existing jobs out on the line for him to solve. So far so obvious but ask yourself, sincerely, _why_ would I leave myself open like that? Don't you get it? Please.

When I explain this, if it doesn't make immediate and complete sense to you, I am going to cut out your heart and use it for chamois, is that in any way unclear? Good.

Nobody else was ever going to solve those five… _cases_. They were too good for Scotland Yard. I'd been bored with those boys a long lot of years before Holmes, and with the spooks a long while before that. It was a mark of mutual respect; nobody else was ever going to solve them, and nobody was ever going to amuse him like I could. Holmes had been weighed and measured by then, and found to be about right. I tested him before I gave it to him. Never did a thing until I was sure. But him and me, for both our sakes, it had to be done.

So we've sorted _that_ out then. His timely demise at the hospital was unavoidable, as was the initial incident which made it so, so where do we go from here?

Suppose, if you're going to be really pedantic about it, I never had to pick on him in the first place, did I? All this business about recognition and mutual respect and having to finish it, the one thing that means none of it could have happened, is if there was no Sherlock at all, don't you think? That seems logical, yes? That follows on nicely?

I am not like you. You're not thinking. I never stop thinking. That's why I work so hard, that's why I'm so good at everything I do, that's why _I fecking win_ all the time, okay? I never stop. And I am _so_ fecking jealous of you sweet, naïve, mindless, celebrity-chasing, soap-watching, comfortably-frigging-numb shower of _sheep_, because you don't know how awful you are. You don't care. You haven't the capacity to look at yourselves and think, 'Dear sweet Jesus, this is a waste of oxygen…" You're jealous of me because I'm switched on, but right back at you, folks, because I can't switch myself off.

There could never be any point in asking if you know what that's like. That's the point we were just discussing. And if I say it's like hell, you'll be thinking of lakes of fire and a man with a tail. That's not it. Hell is banging screaming on the door even after you're sure there's nobody in there.

You don't get this. He got this. Day one, minute one, and his first sniff of me, while the details are my own comforting secret, was a long time before the first breath of my name. I had been watching, and I knew, he _got_ this. Nobody else ever had, likely nobody else ever will. That's why I couldn't just let him slide away. I needed somebody to recognize it and say, no, you're not gone mad. Or, at least, you're not the only one gone mad the same way. And I wanted to say it to him.

They say, don't they, that the difference between an enemy and a nemesis is that a nemesis could just as easily have been your closest friend. Wasn't my fault he turned out to be on the wrong side, or that I only ever even found out about him because of who his brother was. That's another reason it was all so bloody inevitable. But then again, he's a man in mourning and it's not fair to drag him into this. Suffice to say there's a whole other story there and it's another reason. It's the reason me and Sherlock could ever even have caught the faintest traces of each other so…

Stopped it? No, now that I'm thinking about it. We'd be going back a long, long time to have ever had a chance of ever stopping that. I'm sorry to disappoint, but not me, no.

* * *

[By popular demand, there he was. Starting work on some of the others now, and still very definitely taking anybody's suggestions. Lots of hearts, thanks for the interest, Sal.]


End file.
